Guild Wars 2

Durzlla.6295:

The Spiral King.2483:

If we’re talking other issues now, is there any reason why my pet shouldn’t gain bloodlust stacks when I do? The Ranger and pet are meant to work as one unit in Anet’s own words along with they way they balance, and yet runes and sigils don’t affect them. It’s also a reason signets should affect both by default, but that’s been brought up so many times since release I’m not holding my breath.

Why would sigils work with a rangers pet? They don’t scale on our stats at all so it makes no sense for them to be doing so with bloodlust or any of those effects…

They’re a physical entity that can gain boons, I don’t understand why they shouldn’t gain bloodlust? I understand sigils and runes as they aren’t using armor or weapons. But bloodlust most certainly should be given to the pet.

Hell, I’d argue things like WXP bonuses like guard killer and such should as well. Minions I understand… they’re temporary and don’t handicap the class by their mere existence. But Ranger pets are unique. If we’re to be handicapped, the pet should benefit from world bonuses just like us.

Just put a cannon on top of the building. That way few can defend it from many. Beyond that, pass. There’s nothing left for small roaming groups to do that actually benefits WvW other than taking camps, sentries, and killing cows.

What about class imbalance? It’s not just a class vs. class issue like it is in sPvP, but also whether or not a class actually does anything worth doing in WvW.

Account bound dyes.

Account bound commander tags.

Armor lockers for PvE/WvW.

A general skill point pool so I can use my scrolls.

Pristine Fractal Relics no longer taking inventory.

Various other currencies no longer taking inventory.

Increase mail cap if both parties are on each other’s friend’s list.

Double click and auto stack mechanics for (guild) bank.

1: Overlapping range does same DPS as shortbow just like the mid range shot now does. Remove the increased damage at max range and instead simply allow shots beyond 900 deal +30% crit damage.

2: Rapid Fire just needs a second shaved off its duration while maintaining the same damage. It is then a burst skill that easily outshines our standard attack.

3: Only issue I have with this skill is if it misses. Skill should stealth when pressed and do something special if the hit lands.

4: I like and dislike this idea. It has come up tons of times in the past. On the one side it gives us burst, but encourges us to run into melee range to use it (which would then hit for a ton and knock them back) which is fine, but the weapon/class already has issues with defending itself so tying burst to a defensive skill isn’t ideal imo. I think I’d just learn to live with it if it changed, but wouldn’t be my preferred approach.

5: Drop barrage. With the poor damage, it only being a cripple, and requiring us to stand still briefly to set it up, it’s counter productive to anything but zerging. And in zerg situations, you often end up taking about the same damage you deal because retaliation returns about a large chunk of that damage right back to you x5.

Since the class overall lacks AE, make barrage a skill so any spec can use it. Have it provide a bleed on each wave of damage so either a condi or power build would want to use it. Have it immobilize for 2 seconds on the first wave so it has some utility. Tada… it’s now better then spike trap and didn’t require 30pts to do it. So drop spike trap to make room.

Replace it with whatever. I prefer kill shot, but couldn’t care less at this point.

We need both rapid fire to not suck AND a burst skill. Simply dropping rapid fire in exchange for burst really isn’t accomplishing anything.

Better to move Barrage out of the weapon so the class as a whole gets a utility AE skill and put kill shot there.

At least with barrage being a utility skill it could actually do real damage instead of effectively being an AE shortbow shot.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

No one is going to let a warrior land 100 blades either. You have to create the right opportunity.

Lowering the channel and increasing the damage creates an opportunity to negate more of the damge with a single dodge roll. while it hard to land all your rapid fire missing one or two isn’t that bad.

The other issue is that we do more damage with auto attack in most cases so if someone dodges my rapid fire I can land all of my auto attacks.

Good players create situations to land their big attack. Bad player buttons smash and hope they land.

Skull crack being the exception of course?

Burst is burst… the ability to land it is up to the player. The class as a whole is deficient with burst and no one can really claim rapid fire is a burst option to begin with. To make Rapid Fire burst it needs to do the same damage over a much shorter span of time. We can worry about the class’ inability to land it once we have it.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Feyhen.7432:

Hello everyone,

i would like to give my point of view.

I have had problems motivating myself to play Guild Wars 2 for a while know. Here is my personal reason why: I love character progresstion.
I love game with a vast amout of thinks where my character can evolve. I love getting new attacks, getting new ways to combine my attacks, getting new cool weapons and abilitys. Mechanics that opens up while new levels of gameplay.

I am not the gear type, i dont care much about vertical Progression.
I am more in love with horizontal progression and this is,

where Guild Wars 2 lacks.

I play as Warrior and although i have plenty of Alts, my Warrior is my favorite.

But since there are so limited skills and abilities my character can obtain, i dont feel like progressing any longer. I know that i could go for some ascended gear but i am not really interesstet in shiny new armor. I would like to be able to choose my own fighting style rather then only my own look.

As the skill system in Guild Wars 2 is right now, people like me will feel unsatisfied without more abilities to be learned.

Personally i would like to see an enhanced combat system with more ways to progress, with more styles to play. The warrior next to me may have a better looking Greatsword than me, but he will always play like me, execute the same weapon skills with that awesome sword like me, no matter what. I feel like there are not enough ways to individualise at the machinical level.

Hi Fey,

I play a PVT AOE Heal shout War. I have played this role fora long period of time and have never played a DPS War. On top of this I am also easily able to hold agro and support my group. My DPS is terrible but I keep my team alive while they run around destroying everything (-: The reason I raise this is because I would like to know what your role is with you War and I am wondering if you are aware of the different roles that each Profession can play dependent on their traits/skill/sigil/rune and weapon setup?

Note I ‘Look’ like a DPS war because i use a great sword (greatsaw) and a Longbow (Arthropoda). I like you believe that Horizontal Progression should be about role differentiation, however I feel like this system is already very core to the game but that we could do a better job of teaching how it works to a broader audience.

In short there are multiple War and profession roles and thus it is quite unlikely that that War next to you plays just like you.

Chris

Since you brought it up… I’d like you to provide something I’ve been asking ANet to provide for the past 6 months…. can you tell us, the players, what role YOU feel the Ranger class should fill? Because no one who actually plays the class has the foggiest clue why the class exists, what role it should fill, why it doesn’t fill that role, or what to suggest to actually make it fill whatever role you seem to want it to fill.

Now on topic to the rest of the thread…. my issue with the progression model in this game is how you’ve moved away from obtaining gear easily to one that forces players to craft to compete. I personally can’t stand crafting. EVE is the only game I’ve ever seen that has actually had a real crafting system that is profitable and I have on interest in doing it unless there’s some benefit out of it. What I liked about GW2 originally was I could just buy what I wanted. Now I have to craft which is aggravating… I have a timelock to deal with that is aggravating… I play Ranger so I don’t even benefit from my gear the same as most classes which is aggravating…

While these vertical progression models work in other MMO’s because they need to constantly evolve their game with everharder content, that is clearly not the model you are using in GW2. There’s no reason to get better gear because PvE content isn’t complicated. We could easily hit the agony cap to clear all fractals without the armor. WvW is really all the endgame you provide players outside of the pointless PvE grind (with fractals being the only permanent content added to this game). And in WvW where balance is already an afterthought, I’m not sure we needed armor to throw things even further out of whack.

I just don’t see the point given what kind of game GW2 is to have a gear treadmill. There’s no PvE content to keep pace with and that’s typically the only thing other MMO’s have gear treadmills for…

Compare it to volley for rifle.

Volley: 2.1k dps.
Rapid Fire: 1.4k dps.

You really can’t get any closer than those 2 skills. They’re identical in design. One has a shorter channel and 30% more damage the other provides vulnerability (which is the only thing that makes Rapid Fire better than auto attack at max range) :/

Call of the Wild stops doing damage if LOS is blocked (even if you simply turn around).

Viper’s Nest only hits 3 targets.

Bonfire only hits 3 targets.

Storm Spirit’s active only hits 3 targets.

CETheLucid.3964:

snip

Every single thing you listed for GS is defensive in nature. It has kitten poor damage. If you swap to it for burst and don’t kill you’re stuck with a weapon that does really crap damage until maul comes back up. It’s a great support weapon, but that’s not what we’re discussing… If this class had a trait to reduce the cooldown on weapon swap it wouldn’t be such a big deal. That or the damage of the weapon was increased to compete with other melee weapons (something not likely to happen with an evade on the third hit).

Barrage also doesn’t do good damage, I’m not sure what you’re comparing it to to come up with that unless you’re assuming someone is seriously going to stand in it the full duration? What weapons other attacks are you comparing this to to say it’s doing good damage for an AE skill? It does poor damage because it’s a cripple… but no one cares about the cripple and it roots you briefly to set up, something a class like this can’t do unless on a wall.

There are 3 forms of burst available to this class: Maul, Path of Scars, and call lightning (which was just nerfed). If you have other skills you want to claim are burst, please list them and so help me god don’t list rapid fire…

Maul: This skill is great burst. The problem is there’s nothing else the weapon set can do if Maul didn’t finish the target.

Path of Scars: Requires both hits to actually do appreciable damage and is probably one of the least used weapons for this class.

Call Lightning: Just nerfed.

AOE this class has only one real option in Barrage, but it does poor damage, roots a class that relies on mobility, and only cripples the target. The other forms of AE like piercing arrows and traps aren’t really reliable enough to be counted.

So feel free to list the other forms of AE and burst you guys find this class has so we can debate them further.

Utility is the one thing this class actually has a fair bit of, but because it’s almost entirely tied down to pets/spirits, it is very unreliable.

The class doesn’t have the tools to succeed. The 3 most important things a class can provide in an MMO is burst, AE, and utility. That doesn’t mean a class needs to provide all 3, but the Ranger class currently provides none of these things. This means you’re facing an uphill battle every game to make up for the class deficiency in not only damage, but utility, and support as well. This is why many question what this class honestly does and people in larger groups (gvg, wvw meta, etc) consistently rank the class 8th place? Right now it only really functions in a dueling/small group role, but even this is largely because of the current state of conditions and less to do with the class’ design.

Until the class gets some reasonable level of burst, AE, or utility, there’s simply nothing it does that’s worth bringing.

Ralk.7106:

Cufufalating.8479:

SB does more at < 1000 range, LB does more at > 1000 (rumours of a SB nerf not withstanding).

I’m not sure this is still true – it certainly was at release though. I think LB breaks even with shortbow between 500 and 1000 range now.

Even at middle range now, yes.

Soilder.3607:

mistsim.2748:

and in what fantasy are you landing your GS #5?

In what noobish land are you not landing your GS #5?

In the land of people moving in the same direction at me

Why are we discussing HS in the Ranger forum?

btw… just cut its passive by 50% and increase the active by 50%. Done. It’s still the strongest heal in the game, but at least now it will need to be used occasionally.

Durzlla.6295:

Atherakhia.4086:

Been using SB/GS for awhile now. I can’t imagine the MoC made it that much more powerful, but I haven’t played Ranger today other than to test a few things. Good to see you enjoy the weapon combo. Using a signet build?

I’m using WS skills actually lol, i was trying out the trait changes (which aren’t shown in the above build), and it gives us two 2s stuns + sig of parylization =4.6s of them being unable to do anything + the immob and knockdowns, it’s mean…. i was using 2 spiders (the ones with 2 immobs) but i felt dirty so i changed to canines.

2 knockdowns, a fear, and a immob is always more fun

Been using SB/GS for awhile now. I can’t imagine the MoC made it that much more powerful, but I haven’t played Ranger today other than to test a few things. Good to see you enjoy the weapon combo. Using a signet build?

[edit…] just saw your build, so obviously not signet

Well if no one reports it, they’ll never know about it since they don’t read this forum.

Honestly, seems good. Now it’s legitimately a hard choice between piercing arrows and eagle eye. Not to mention perma fury is hardly unprecedented.

Granted we are Rangers :/

Linnael.1069:

With the Wintersday patch, I’d like to take the opportunity and point you all towards Snowball Mayem, and specifically the Slingshot Scout’s number 4 skill as what I envision replacing rapid fire. Fits the bill near perfectly.

Charges up to a really longbow type of long range, feels very nice to use, combos well with stealth, isn’t easily stopped by strafing.

We had this discussion a year ago

ANet ignored us then too.

Shortbow’s damage is still higher than Longbow short range. I’d also argue that the Shortbow’s skills are a little more valuable for roaming. But please don’t forget that Shortbow was supposed to be our condi weapon. It’s probably the closest we have to a full condi weapon where axe is more of a hybrid weapon.

The issue has always been that longbow is to easy to counter because there are more ways for melee to get in range and stay there then there are ways for ranged classes to get at range and stay there. So longbow was only really ever used at the mid and short range outside of a zerg/tower setting and the shortbow was a significantly better power weapon than a purely power based weapon despite being first and foremost, a condi weapon.

It still has its place, but the fact that longbow now competes in damage and mid range really isn’t the turning point for shortbow. It was when they reduced its range to 900 and it became so similar to axe.

The Chosen Link.3247:

urdriel.8496:

is LB bugged?? each attack give you 1-2 sec of fury.

What traits do you have because I’m not seeing this.

Also can’t duplicate even with 2handed mastery.

At this point I think it’s time for the pet to give the Ranger a spirit and so long as you have that pet selected, the Ranger can press F2 and IT casts whatever the hell move the pet had.

It can then have a spirit wolf spawn next to the Ranger that howls.
It can then have a spirit owl flutter around like a moron for 4 seconds before hitting someone twice for 1.5k.
It can then stealth the Ranger for 6 seconds while we can shoot without it breaking stealth with 100% chance to crit thanks to remorseless! wait…

Prysin.8542:

nirvana.8245:

Nope, we still don’t want you :p Not in guild group play anyways. In small scale yeah they are fine.

wouldnt wanna be in a guild group either. Too much elitism and screaming, way less fun then running with randoms.

@Ather
follwing Anets statistics on the balance between the professions, some 80% of us has made a ranger at some point. I dare say 80% of those 80% gave up before reaching level 50, because they saw warriors, guards and eles do much more awesome stuff in WvW and PvE. Some 15% of those remaining 20% stuck with the profession till they reached 80, yet they most likely relied on tried and tested builds such as RRR, BM Bunker, Glass Cannon Bearbow, Trapper and Spirit Ranger, without considering or taking into account the way you must play those builds to get the most out of them. The remaining 5% can be split into 4 sections.
1% decided to follow the FOTM and rerolled
1% fell in love with another profession
2% use their ranger for casual play only
1% actually spent time perfecting, developing and creating new builds and playstyles.

That last, final percentage, are the ones which you meet ingame that are really really awesome foes. Their the guys and gals you really wish you wouldn’t have to fight. Sadly, from your understanding and insight, i believe you belong to the 2% that played the ranger casually. Not because you seem to be stupid, but because you seem to not understand the underlying implications of what different skills and combinations there-of may provide you.

This is what you want to believe, but it’s a fallacy. The WvW community is large enough at this point where they can distinguish the difference between player skill and class shortcomings. The WvW community by and large, and especially the large, well organized guilds that have been playing these types of games for decades can spot what does and does not work before you even factor in individual skill. None of these power guilds have any interest in Rangers. They have their 1 or 2 and wouldn’t go out of their way to recruit another.

No amount of player skill is going to compensate for the class’s shortcomings. You and I have never met, you haven’t a clue how well I play this class or what my interests with the class are. There’s no reason to keep trying to say I’m a terrible player. I’ve never doubted your abilities only your opinion of the class.

I’m glad you enjoy this class and you feel slight number tweaks and maybe some trait shaving will be all the class needs. Not everyone is going to agree with you and certainly no one on this forum is going to buy your story that this class isn’t worthy of the 8th place.

Prysin.8542:

Atherakhia.4086:

Doesn’t work the way you imply I don’t think. Up to 5 people will get the buff, once you have the buff that’s your 1 heal. The same person will never get a second heal every 10 seconds. I’ve played around with the 2 different ranks and it’s also looking like only one heals despite there being 2 buffs on the target.

This heal is garbage, but it’s been out for an hour, and this is wvw where spirits are useless so…

yes you cant have 2 heal procs at the same time, but the ICD is on the spirit itself. So if you get in range of a different spirit, you enter that specific spirits proc and ICD. Me and two other guys tested with with sun spirit. we had one guy run in and out of our spirits AE, result was he set people on fire much more often.

Also Ather, you obviously have no clue as to were the ranger is atm in terms of power. So just stop your silly whining about them being wastly underpowered. They have been ok for a while now. There is much room for improvement, but atleast they can hold their own in any and all situations.

Unless you want to be a zerker bearbow PVE hero. Then you are useless no matter what.

Yea, clearly I’m way off base considering the majority of people concur that they’re the least useful class in WvW. As I’ve said countless times with you… you’re letting your bias and your opinion that ANet can do no wrong cloud your judgement. I mean spirits are useful in WvW as anything but roaming? Come on dude… you’re calling me clueless?

I’ll test your theory as to how the above scenario works, but I will say right now that it is impossible to design a working strat around it. It’s more like you’re hoping random Ranger’s spirits die in hopes you get the buff from another.

And hold their own in any/all situations? What game are you playing dude… no one on this forum is buying what you’re selling. Go to the Ranger forums with this nonsense. Every class in the game will tell you they’ll almost always target the Ranger first… even Rangers will. Outside of roaming, the class is outshined by 7 other classes. It’s not worthless, as I’ve sound numerous times… but what it brings is below par compared to every other class.

Nike.2631:

Soilder.3607:

So just because one build has too much evasion, we’re going to Nerf nearly every single ranger build? Logic?

You just explained the logic yourself – when “nearly every single Ranger build” includes one trait, its pretty %#&@ing obvious that trait is overpowered for its cost.

To be fair it was a 5pt trait in a tree most need 30pts in regardless because of the miserable condi options for the class.

I certainly understand the OP’s frustration. The changes this class does get almost always seem like random shots in the dark like ANet just throws darts at a board to choose what they’ll mess with next.

This is just a completely lost class and not even the developers have a clue what’s going on. I’d say abandon ship but it sank about 6 months ago.

Doesn’t work the way you imply I don’t think. Up to 5 people will get the buff, once you have the buff that’s your 1 heal. The same person will never get a second heal every 10 seconds. I’ve played around with the 2 different ranks and it’s also looking like only one heals despite there being 2 buffs on the target.

This heal is garbage, but it’s been out for an hour, and this is wvw where spirits are useless so…

jcbroe.4329:

I wish people would stop suggesting putting Traps into Wilderness Survival.

Not because it doesn’t make sense, but because the last thing we need is an entire build whose offensive traits directly compete with all of it’s defensive traits. Our absolute best defensive traits are all in Wilderness Survival.

It would literally outright kill the trap build since in order to use traps you would have to sacrifice the little defensive trait options the build currently has in order to make traps usable.

INSTEAD, traps should do better direct damage so that they can be used by power builds as well. It doesn’t help that Skirmishing really has zero useful trait options for power builds, but Marksmanship is overloaded with too many to use at once.

So really, the better question would be: why are ranger traitlines all so bad?

Traits would need to swapped. The defensive stuff would just move and hopefully ANet would do it in a logical manner that would open up more build diversity and not narrow it. It’s not like they’ve move the traits and have 20 in one line and 4 in another.

Any random trinket not requiring 30 points in marks to work on the ranger.

Kill Shot.

The same way they seemed to have made all of the Ranger decisions… closed their eyes, spun around real fast a couple times, then threw a dart at a board containing post it notes with random nonsense written on them.

Prysin.8542:

Atherakhia.4086:

Prysin.8542:

Atherakhia.4086:

Prysin.8542:

(I dare you find a setup with any other profession that does 3k crits from 1500 range in a “semi” AOE manner consistently with the AA alone.)

Ele Fire Staff #1.

This is talking single target…

1200 range max. Strike one, two, three and you’re out. Also, traited staff has 180 AOE, which means it has a maximum range of 1290. Dealing 324 damage with 0.85 power-coefficient.
Longbow AA is 1800 range max (manual fire) traited. Dealing 332 damage with 0.9 power-coefficient.
Math…math…math…. at range, ele loses hands down. Why? Because ele fire staff 1 is actually slower in rate of fire, range is shorter, damage is less, and just one more thing. the AOE is capped at 3 players. Piercing arrows can go through 5.

Sorry Ather, but you need to look up on rangers a bit more i guess.

So your only value is the max range, something impossible to maintain in an active game? Well then obviously Ranger wins since no class has a 1500 range weapon. And you’re completely ignoring the fact that Ele is the highest DPS class in the game? Come on dude can you be any more of a biased appologist?

Then again the fact is that while using staff, they are undoubtly the highest DPS profession. Due to their AOE coverage. However at the same time, to obtain that DPS, their survivability goes down the drain. A ranger can maintain high survivability compared to damage output.
Also, dude, how conceited can you be? Warriors, Engineers even thieves has a 1500 range attack or weapon. However out of those, ranger has the best long range DPS.
Another thing we are blatantly ignoring here is pet. While most pets are useless, utilizing pets such as the Jungle Stalker with its might, or the Red Moa with its fury will drastically increase DPS once more.

Then again, while i am biased towards the ranger, i also DO have an ele that iv’e been leveling for ages.

Ele has perma fury and 5+ might on their own as well. So those benefits from the pets are meaningless. While the coefficient and speed are less on the Ele, the Ele has the benefit of their other skills actually adding to their dps in a meaningful manner. Didn’t bother bringing it up because you wanted only to compare AA (which Ele still wins once you factor in traits even if you assume max range instead of less than 600).

Both classes will end up being 2 shot by a thief playing this way so survivability tanking or not isn’t really an issue. I’d bet money that most thieves would target a Ranger before they target an Ele though. And the Ele still provides enormous utility with the staff whereas the Ranger provides next to nothing.

Look… the Ranger isn’t useless. Not even I’m trying to say it’s a lost cause. I’m simply saying the class doesn’t have enough in the wins column to offset the cons. Especially when we’re dealing with small/mid size groups as opposed to roaming and dueling.

I have no idea how Ranger is even in the top 5 on this list.

Warrior 1st above all other classes. It can’t be caught and can get into the mess to deliver its damage and still get out alive.

Thief would be second, but you said no thief.

Mesmer are slippery as all hell and back.

Guardian because they can take a beating.

Engineers can’t be caught by much.

Ele has a lot of tools but isn’t going to go the distance anymore. Still I would say all the heals and such push it above Ranger.

Ranger can get away, but it relies on Swoop to do it and can be easily caught by all of the above classes.

Prysin.8542:

Atherakhia.4086:

Prysin.8542:

(I dare you find a setup with any other profession that does 3k crits from 1500 range in a “semi” AOE manner consistently with the AA alone.)

Ele Fire Staff #1.

1200 range max. Strike one, two, three and you’re out. Also, traited staff has 180 AOE, which means it has a maximum range of 1290. Dealing 324 damage with 0.85 power-coefficient.
Longbow AA is 1800 range max (manual fire) traited. Dealing 332 damage with 0.9 power-coefficient.
Math…math…math…. at range, ele loses hands down. Why? Because ele fire staff 1 is actually slower in rate of fire, range is shorter, damage is less, and just one more thing. the AOE is capped at 3 players. Piercing arrows can go through 5.

Sorry Ather, but you need to look up on rangers a bit more i guess.

So your only value is the max range, something impossible to maintain in an active game? Well then obviously Ranger wins since no class has a 1500 range weapon. And you’re completely ignoring the fact that Ele is the highest DPS class in the game? Come on dude can you be any more of a biased appologist?

Prysin.8542:

(I dare you find a setup with any other profession that does 3k crits from 1500 range in a “semi” AOE manner consistently with the AA alone.)

Ele Fire Staff #1.

A single skin is all it would have taken to make the players happy. Hell, since ascended back piece inequality in WvW is such a huge issue, they could have even just given everyone an ascended backpiece.

Give it the look of a goblet strapped to your back. It can glow gold, silver, or bronze if you were 1st, 2nd, or 3rd. Don’t even need to infuse it to keep the PvE crowd from QQing.

NargofWoV.4267:

It is difficult to work on Balance when a lot of classes have a variety of ways to play them, like a Ranger that can be great in 1 on 1 fights but the same build is pretty useless in Keep takes, defends or zerg battles.

How do you balance that?

By giving them another spec to specialize in that can hold its own while also ensuring they provide enough utility and support to be worthwhile to a group regardless of spec. The same way you do it for any class.

Having a roaming/small group and large group spec isn’t something new in this game. Having a roaming build be 100% useless to a zerg, well that could arguably be considered Ranger specific.

Meglobob.8620:

WvW is not mean’t to be ‘balanced’ in any way…

Its really small scale warfare 5-100 player groups vs 5-100 player groups, with solo roamers.

Just like the ‘real world wars’ it is not balanced at all. In the real world wars are won by the side with most industrial capacity, ie…produce more weapons than opponents, better technology, better co-ordinated, better use of logistics and best communication.

WvW reflects that very well.

The only part of GW2 which should be balanced is sPvP, there is no need at all to balance WvW or PvE.

Maybe in the strictest definition this is true, but overall class balance must still be there or WvW is a complete waste of time. Right now the current meta doesn’t support the entire medium armor family. Rangers in fact are nearly useless to the current meta. Mesmers bring 2 forms of utility and no one cares what else they do. We have Guardians and Warriors that clearly blow every other class out of the water with Necros not being too far behind.

If sPvP was mostly balanced, WvW would be too. But it’s not even close and many of the problems, even the slight ones that skate by and are ignored because they aren’t ‘too bad’, in sPvP are blown out of proportion in WvW.

3 Warrior, 1 Guardian, 1 Necro. Multiply as you see fit.

Prysin.8542:

@ather

While i do not ENJOY the fact that ranger is lacking in terms of the three things i stated. I do acknowledge that IF a ranger was sposed to excel or even compete with other profession in the three things i stated, ANET would have added it from the start. Now, considering they DID NOT, i assume that they had other plans for the profession. Obviously those plans did not work, however turning the ranger into a nerfed warrior, as you are implying, are not a solution, it is simply avoiding the problem altogether by just giving it a flat out DPS and Utility boost while not keeping in line with the professions feel and function. This is not only detrimental to the profession, but also the game. Especially your idea to rip skills from other games (D2/D3/WoW). Sure they may fit in, however by doing so, the game’s originality get washed out, and in the end, other professions will get these “somewhat appropriate” skill rip-offs too.

I still do not understand why people can not work with what they got, instead of whining about a total re-creation of the profession. The latter is obviously too expensive, time consuming and blatantly redundant to ever be done. Another interesting thing to keep in mind is, if you redo the ranger from the ground up, the other professions should get equal treatment in order to rectify their issues. This again means that you will have to redo, the entire game to compensate for the new level of power and efficiency. This again costs even more money, is not worth it to the company, and certainly wouldn’t help the ranger. As in the end, if everyone else get’s their stuff perfected and fixed, we will still get the shortest straw simply because of what makes the other professions weak, make’s ranger strong.

Because what the class has doesn’t work and no matter how much you wish it to be so, it never will work without the basic elements any class needs to succeed in this game.

There’s also no need to redesign the Ranger from the ground up. Now it may take a lot of work to get things like pets and spirits into working order, this isn’t asking for a redesign. It’s asking ANet to do what they should have been doing over the past year and finding a solution to glaring problems that have been present since beta. I also wouldn’t call giving this class a single ondemand burst skill and a single AE skill a complete redesign either.

Kill shot also doesn’t turn the class into a nerfed warrior. The Ranger is already a unique class even if it has no purpose or direction right now. All kill shot is doing is providing the class some burst that is thematically accurate. And all the skills I suggested are just clones of what other classes provide as well.

Honestly, the largest problem I think you, me, and other players are having right now is no one has the faintest clue just what the Ranger class is supposed to do in this game. This is an MMO… so a jack of all trades class is not going to work right off the bat so don’t even try to pretend that’s what this class is. We’ve asked ANet to tell us what the class is supposed to do or what role it fulfills and all they’ve come back with is ’it’s the pet class’ which is probably the most painful thing any Ranger has ever heard in their life considering the miserable state pets are in.

Until ANet actually has a defined goal and a direction for this class to go all players can do is play the way they want and make suggestions to fill the holes the class has in their preferred play style. For me, being a power Ranger, it’s the total lack of burst and any meaningful group utility.

Their response to F2 abilities was “lol… no.” Feel free to check out the dec 10th thread if you don’t believe me.

DeadlySynz.3471:

Not sure why people say Rangers don’t have any burst damage.. Sure our pets could use some buffing as their damage both stink and they die to quick. Roaming i’v heard they do quite well.

Aside from that, my ranger does more burst damage than my warrior. The rapid fire consistently does between 15k-20K damage with no might but 25 stacks of bloodlust. This is also using only the stacks of vulnerability rapid fire applies.

Barrage usually causes somewhere between 12K-16K to the front line and will continually apply cripple which can make it difficult to remove harmful conditions, if removal is targeting cripple.

Their escape capability is decent now with stealth capability. Their conditional removal could use some work, well a lot of work actually. It would also be nice if the pet learned to hit stuff and stayed alive for a change.

If you don’t gear them properly, they won’t be doing very good burst damage. I have to laugh at some people that post their builds then complain about damage. Mixing knights, valkyrie, berserker, maybe some carrion. Come on now.. really.

Spec for damage and learn to stay alive, you’d be surprised just how strong they are compared to other classes.

15 to 20k rapid fire means you’re sitting at 100% crit chance and popped all your trinkets. It also means this is 15 to 20k damage over 5 seconds. Eviscerate does this damage over one second. 100b does this damage over 3.5 seconds. Most melee weapons can auto attack for this damage over the same amount of time.

Burst does not mean you hit a single button and it does a lot of damage. It means you do very high DPS well in excess of your normal sustained dps. Rapid Fire does about the same damage as your sustained damage at max range with the primary benefit of rapid fire being the vulnerability stacks. If it didn’t put vulnerability on the target I believe the math shows it doing 5% more damage than your auto attack over the same time frame, but I’d have to dig for the thread.

You mentioned it in your first post… in group oriented games there are 3 things that matter most… burst damage, AE damage, and group utility.

The class has 2 forms of burst on terrible weapons and no trait to reduce the cooldown on weapon swap.

The class has only 1 real form of AE damage in barrage, it does crap damage, is only a cripple, roots the ranger using it, and often gets a Ranger killed before it does anything noticeable due to retaliation.

Class utility is hard to get a read on. With so much of the class’ utility centered around their pets and spirits, and with pets and spirits being absolutely useless in WvW, they don’t provide anything. If pets and spirits actually worked in a larger group setting as opposed to just roaming? Who knows… probably still would be considered pretty low on the utility list, but they would at least provide something. The issue with spirits is how they tie you into a very specific spec and most people don’t really want to play that way.

Until these 3 areas are improved, there’s no real hope for the class as a whole in larger scale combat. It’s great at dueling and roaming (mostly because conditions are overpowered), but as the numbers go up, the Ranger’s worth goes down exponentially.

As a side note… someone else made nearly an identical thread yesterday:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Question-to-the-WvW-community/first#post3331717

Prysin.8542:

Right, so we have found some issues, there are more for sure, however, what should be done to fix this?
Especially the issues related to WvW.

A good example is;
The “bearbow” ranger is quite useless in WvW- Bears DO have their uses even in WvW, but there are other pets that does whatever job they do, much much better. However in PvE, bearbow is actually useful, as you can let the pet tank while you do the DPS.
In short, buffing the bearbow setup in WvW would make it OP in PvE, nerfing it in PvE would forever break it in WvW.
There are other examples that are better, but this is probably a build that most people know of and can relate to.

Buffing bearbow doesn’t make the Ranger op in PvE because the bow part of the bearbow is awful in PvE.

In your op you seem to want to find some way to justify why this class should have NO ae, NO burst, and NO utility… I hope you were simply trying to justify why the Ranger may or may not have the BEST in these categories? Because if we refuse to give the class ANY ae, burst, or utility then you may as well not even bother approaching the class because these are 3 things that are mandatory in any multiplayer game.

Burst: Right now the class only really has one or 2 real options for burst: maul and path of scars. The problem with these weapons is aside from these 2 skills, they don’t offer much else offensively. Especially in the case of Greatsword which is a support weapon first and foremost. The easiest way to make these forms of burst reliable is to give the class a trait to reduce the cooldown on weapon swap much like Warriors have. Now this alone won’t give the class enough burst to actually be useful to a group, but solo/roaming would probably find this to be mostly acceptable.

For group combat the class is still very short on burst and needs 1 or 2 other forms of burst to win. The easiest and most ‘in theme’ option is to simply give the class Kill Shot like Warriors get. It will obviously do 25 to 30% less damage than a Warrior’s skill just like every other weapon option the class has, so Warriors can settle down about being dethroned. The best thing to do to add this is either move barrage or introduce a new signet that when acitvated gives the class a unique attack dependent on the weapon they use. Longbow could be a kill shot, shortbow a burning arrow, etc etc.

AE: When it comes to AE the class only really has barrage. It’s incredibly weak, roots the class briefly while channeling, and pulses a low damage attack which triggers retaliation (why retaliation doesn’t simply return a % of the damage done is beyond me) which often results in the Ranger’s death. So with all of these issues it’s really a terrible AE for the class and one most people don’t use outside of keep defense/offense.

The best option, in my opinion, since this class is so AE deprived is to make this a skill. Once it’s a skill the damage can be boosted so it’s actually worth using. Since we’re adding skills, there’s no reason to remove anything. If we must remove something, spike trap is easily the worst utility skill we have. It’s a single use cripple and bleed, does poor damage, needs 30 pts to immobilize a target, and has a similar cooldown. Why not simply make barrage immobilize up to 5 targets on the first wave of shots (which will offset the fact you’re immobilized while channeling it), each wave stacks bleeds and cripples, and power damage is increased dramatically? It’s now better than a fully traited spike trap with no trait investment, is now class wide AE instead of weapon specific, valuable to power and condi builds, etc. It also has the added advantage of making room for killshot on the longbow.

Now this may not be enough AE, but it’s a reasonable start.

Utility: This is the difficult thing to approach. A lot of our current utility is tied to pets which simply don’t work in general… but when you consider them in WvW they’re lolworthy. This includes our main pet and spirits. If spirits and pets were the least bit useful in WvW perhaps our utility would be on par, or at least to the point where a group of 10 or so may actually consider bringing a Ranger along. Aside from adding clones of very popular skills to the class (Wall of Thorns to block projectiles and knockback foes, Trailblazing so the Ranger and 5 people by it all move at 33% movement speed, Improved Muddy Terrain so those who stand it gain stability [which is a skill in the game], and some way to put 10 stacks of vuln on 5 different targets) I think just getting spirits and pets to a useable spot in WvW may help things from a utility stand point. It doesn’t help with build diversity much because only condi/bunker builds will exist once spirits work in WvW…. but for now, lets just get Ranger working.

yea, I was worried I was reading it wrong. Never having actually played a spirit build I was curious what the 10 second cycle meant. Sucks it can only proc once a cycle. Oh well, disappointed now.

http://imgur.com/a/XJLiX

Heal is looking much better than originally thought, though I’m very concerned with things like the necro heal. I’m also in agreement with the above… that this whole patch, including this heal, is just an enormous push to drive us all into spirit builds. Done absolutely nothing to help with any other build.

how long until the stream is uploaded for those of us who work for a living

Mogar.9216:

Yep a unique skin would have done it, weapon or armor. They could have easily made the skin different colours to represent how well your server did in the season. That is really all you need to keep most people happy. It wouldn’t have upset any game balance at all.

Pretty much… look at living story. It has been the same old recycled content every 2 weeks for the past several months but players do them and enjoy it because they get a reward equivilent to the work they put in.

A simple weapon or armor skin would have been plenty to keep players happy.

Absolutely… after the [censored]storm ANet is getting from this season do you honestly expect them to make the same mistake the second time around? The only thing I’ll do different is actually move to a server that won’t become a deserted wasteland after 1 week making the final 6 weeks of the season absolutely miserable.